August 18, 2014

Providing World Cup coverage for French- and English-speaking countries across Africa

We created two responsive Word Press sites to provide expanded VOA coverage of the 2014 World Cup tournament for French- and English-speaking countries across Africa. Because of extremely limited bandwidth issues on the continent, we wanted to create a lean, minimalist site. Through the use of progressive enhancements and responsive design we added features to tailor the experience for phones, tablets and desktop browsers.

RESPONSIBILITIES

The World Cup project, was a major, multi-month commitment that began in January and ran through the post-tournament coverage in August. I led a team of designers and developers in the creation and maintenance of the French and English VOA World Cup sites. I also:

Led daily scrums to track the progress and help ensure we met our goals and deadlines.

Helped coordinate the daily editorial production with the French-to-Africa and VOA English newsrooms.

Captured and translated the needs of the journalists into the design and development schedule for the site.

Created original animations that were versioned in English and French.

Developed a JavaScript library using D3 to create responsive charts and graphics for the live match coverage.

Provided live game coverage and bespoke graphics.

Helped provide around the clock sysadmin support to ensure the sites and graphics continued to function throughout the month of games.

Pretended to care about sports for the seven months leading to the tournament.

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About

BRIAN WILLIAMSON (@BrianWmson) is a graphic artist, interactive developer and designer for Voice of America. He designs, illustrates, animates and writes code to tell stories. VOA provides objective news and information in 45 languages to over 235 million people around the world every week. For 75 years, VOA has broadcast content that many people cannot get locally: objective news and information about the US, their region and the world.
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